Archive for June, 2011

The INSEMTIVES tutorial “10 Ways to make your Semantic Application addictive” is back at this year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011), October 23-27, 2011, in Bonn, Germany.

Summary

In many application scenarios useful semantic content can hardly be created (fully) automatically, but motivating people to become an active part of this endeavor is still an art more than a science. In this tutorial we will look into fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring technology – and of the applications deploying such technology – in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine the ways these incentives can be transferred into technology design.

We will present how methods and techniques from areas as diverse as participation management, usability engineering, mechanism design, social computing, and game mechanics can be jointly applied to analyze semantically enabled applications, and subsequently design incentives-compatible variants thereof. The discussion will be framed by three case studies on the topics of enterprise knowledge management, media and entertainment, and IT ecosystems, in which combinations of these methods and techniques has led to increased user participation in creating useful semantic descriptions of various types of digital resources – text documents, images, videos and Web services and APIs.

Furthermore, we will revisit the best practices and guidelines that have been at the core of an earlier version of this tutorial at the previous edition of the ISWC in 2010, following the empirical findings and insights gained during the operation of the three case studies just mentioned. These guidelines provide IT developers with a baseline to create technology and end-user applications that are not just functional, but facilitate and encourage user participation that supports the further development of the Semantic Web.

All information on the tutorial can be found here.

The Third Canadian Semantic Web Symposium, will be held in the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia (Aug 5, 2011). As a follow-up to the previous symposium, CSWS 2011 aims at bringing together Canadian and international researchers in semantic technologies and knowledge management to discuss about various issues related to the Semantic Web.

The Third Canadian Semantic Web Symposium 2011 calls for papers in all topics related to semantic web technologies and their applications. The following are some example topics:
· Languages, tools and methodologies for the Semantic Web
· The application of AI technologies in the Semantic Web
· Searching, querying, visualizing and interpreting the Semantic Web
· Semantic Web-based Knowledge Management;
· Semantic Grid and semantic Grid services
· Trust, privacy, security on the Semantic Web
· Ontology design, evolution and management
· Ontology mapping and merging
· Semantic Web and uncertainty
· Description logics and frame logics as ontology formalisms
· Modular, distributed, and multi-ontologies
· Semantic Web technologies for collaboration and cooperation
· Semantic Web Services (description, discovery, invocation, composition)
· Semantic Web and databases
· Practical applications of Semantic Web techniques in e-business, e-commerce, e-government and e-learning
· Semantic Web rule languages and engines
· Social Semantic Web (Web 3.0)

CSWS 2011 will feature two tracks: a Research and a Work-in-Progress track. The objective of the research track is to solicit original papers that present accomplished research on the area of the Semantic Web. The Work-in-Progress track aims at providing an opportunity for practitioners to present their on-going research on principles and applications of the Semantic Web, even when implementation or deployment has not been completed.

Accepted submissions will be published in the symposium Proceeding.

Authors are invited to submit full papers in PDF, Postscript or MS-Word RTF electronically. All papers must be written in English. Research papers can be up to 12 pages in length and Work-In-Progress papers can be up to 6 pages. Papers must be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS style. Please follow the instructions for authors at Springer’s site for authors. To submit papers, please follow visit
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cswws11
Papers that are not submitted through the automatic procedure cannot be reviewed.

Submission Deadline: June 20th, 2011
Acceptance Notification: July 15th, 2011

Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and robust reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate heterogeneous knowledge or to use homogeneous knowledge across different domains.

Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics of a software’s domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as on information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use of provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and querying (to facilitate reasoning).

Other neighbouring research areas, though, have also investigated topics that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g. knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made explicit the relationship between an ontology and its development context. Finally, research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored how an agent’s ontology needs to change at run-time because of interactions with its context – for instance with other agents whose ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world situations. This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology’s language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory.

Topics of interest:
This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context in  the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should  present either Semantic Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g., scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g. revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).

Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to:
- Named graphs
- Provenance
- Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
- Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
- Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
- Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
- Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
- Non-classical belief revision
- Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context versioning
- Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
- Information and knowledge integration
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge management
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
- Ontology-based data access
- Querying
- Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
- Temporal and spatial reasoning
- Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
- General problem solving for semantic technologies
- Machine learning for the Semantic Web
- Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

How to submit:
Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload submissions on Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System at http://ees.elsevier.com/jws
Choose “Reasoning with context in SW” as article type. See the link “Guide for Authors” on the above url for instructions.

If you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact us at organization [at] arcoe.org

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: 26 June 2011
- First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
- Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
- Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
- Tentative publication date: April 2012

Guest editors:
Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ivan Varzinczak (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa)

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